Democrats/Lean Democratic current conditions assessment is relative insensitive to Trump being president, and statistically significantly related to news sentiment. Republican/Lean Republican perception is overwhelmingly associated with whether Trump is president.
Figure 1: Overall current conditions assessment (bold black, left scale), Democratic (blue, left scale), Independent (chartreuse, left scale), and Republican (red, left scale), SF Fed news sentiment index (green, right scale).
UMCURRDEM = 89.3*** + 1.86TRUMP + 50.6***NEWSSENTIMENT
standardized coefficients: 0.051 0.479
Adj-R2 = 0.21, SER = 16.5
UMCURRREP = 61.6*** + 50.7***TRUMP + 28.2***NEWSENTIMENT
standardized coefficients: 0.804 0.157
Adj-R2 = 0.64, SER = 18.9
The “impact” of news sentiment on Democratic perceptions is nearly ten times that of Trump. For Republicans, Trump is about five times impactful as news sentiment.